China, Climate, Imperialism

There is a phenomenon I discovered rather recently that I call "whataboutChinaism". On any discussion on any political or economic topic, it's a kind of a moo-point where all previous discussion is supposed to become irrelevant because China is so big and everything else is so insignificant in comparison.

It's a very comfortable position because it implies that people outside of the Central Committee of CCP don't have to do anything about anything, ever.

I saw this with my own eyes during a presentation on a new airport near Lisbon being built by a French multinational. We were explaining that the project was a climate suicide, and someone in the audience mentioned China. Absolutely off-topic as it was, I managed to get it: the impotence culture feeding climate denial deep into our psyche.

Similar situations happened around conversations related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. "What about China?", I was told, as if the EU had no influence on the matter at any point.

So I decided to read a bit on the subject (a total of twenty articles). Here are my notes.

Basics

China's "market socialism" is not state capitalism nor Keynesian. It's an extended NEP policy. *

China is transferring a greater amount of surplus-value to the core countries than it receives from the periphery (average labor terms of trade + balance of international labor transfer), even though it did establish an exploitative relationship with South Asia and Africa. Therefore, China is a semi-peripheral country. * 

China identifies as Global South and takes "peaceful coexistence" as an ideological stance. Therefore, it will not do political, social or military intervention to another sovereign state (didn't even send help against ISIS). On the other hand, it does have an economic hegemony plan: zero-interest loans for infrastructure, credits repayable in resources, direct investment, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. * The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), connected to the Belt and Road Initiative, is China's counter-hegemonic initiative to IMF and the World Bank. *

Current trends

Biden builds on the tension created by Trump, towards a new cold war on China. The plan is not to contain but to constrain it, and then dissolve through internal conflicts (Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong). The US discourse is "rules-based international order" while China insist on the "UN-based order of sovereign states". *

For the US, two Koreas is better than a unified Korea because it can militarize one and put defense missile units (THAAD) in on without neighboring China. For this, the US needs controlled tension between the two Koreas. * 

Ukraine crisis and Russia

To begin with, Russia does not classify as an imperialist country. 

• It has only 25 companies in the Forbes 2000 list, corresponding to 1,45% of total sales and less than 1% of collective assets. 
• Labor productivity (GDP per working hour) is 25.4, in comparison to EU=53.4 and US=69.9 , which means surplus-value does not flow towards Russia. 
• It ranks 15thin manufacturing, providing 1% of world output. Over 82% of its exports are raw materials, and it is 32th in exports of high-tech goods. 
• There is only one Russian bank in top 100 (and it ranks 66). There are zero Russian corporations on top 100 based on their investment abroad. Of financial and non-financial wealth in the world, the US has 31% share, China 14.4%, and Russia 0.7%. 
• No branch of Russian manufacturing is competitive on the international market except for the armaments industry. The US accounts for 34% of global military sales, Russia 22% . The recent yearly increase in Pentagon's budget was greater than the whole Russian military budget ($66B, 2017), which ranks 4th (after China and Saudi Arabia.) *

China and Russia are strongly allied but there is no military component to this currently, not even under discussion. * 

Seizure of Russian $300B foreign exchange reserves in the US, EU and UK may accelerate the running-away from dollar in the world. *

Climate policy

China has no absolute cap on emissions in its targets, consumes more than half of world coal and is building more coal plants. It started carbon emission trading scheme (ETS) in July 2021 but price is too low to be effective. * It installed 16.9 GW of offshore wind capacity in 2021 became world's number one with 26.4 GW total offshore wind capacity. * 

From 2019 to 2021, China increased its emissions by 750 Mt, more than offsetting the aggregate decline in the rest of the world of 570 Mt. *

The 14th five-year plan for the energy sector was launched in March 2022. It reasserts the role of coal to support renewable expansion. * Although this sounds strange to me, Chinese policy experts defend that the government is building more capacity on coal so that there would be enough energy security to deal with renewable variability. (China imports oil and gas.) So they say that coal capacity would increase but coal consumption would decrease. *